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Law became young Holmes's great passion. In the course of his law studies he visited John Stuart Mill—whose philosophy came closest to a jurisprudence based not on precedents but on what Holmes called "the felt necessities of the time."
At 31, young Holmes married an old friend, Fannie Dixwell. They lived in Dr. Holmes's house, because Wendell was making hardly any money. Laboriously, conscientiously he revised and updated Kent's famed legal Commentaries. Then he slaved on a work of his own, The Common Law, in which words like "logic," "rule," "syllogism" were replaced by such unlegal expressions as "experience," "expediency," "necessity," "life." Soon Harvard's admiring President Eliot offered Holmes a professorship of law. A year later Holmes took his seat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court Bench. "So you are the son of the celebrated Oliver Wendell Holmes?" asked an Englishman after Holmes became Massachusetts Chief Justice. "No," replied Holmes. "He was my father."
"The Constitution," said the new Justice, "is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." Holmes was "like rum to the other judges." But those who feared he would express his broad theories in frequent dissents were disappointed. In the newly begun battle between organized labor and the corporations, Justice Holmes dissented from his colleagues only twice in seven years. In the next five years he delivered two stirring dissents upholding workingmen's right to strike and form picket lines.
Finger in the Machinery. When trust-busting Roosevelt I appointed Holmes to the U.S. Supreme Court, Holmes at once disappointed T.R. by supporting Railroad Tycoons James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan in an antitrust case. Said the new Justice in his first Supreme Court dissent: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. ... We must read the words before us as if the question were whether two small exporting grocers shall go to jail." Cried Roosevelt: "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that!"
To his colleagues, Holmes was a strange fish. He gave his opinions briefly, spontaneously (some Justices took six months). When lawyers complained, Holmes roared: "May God twist my tripes if I string out the obvious for the delectation of fools!" As soon as an attorney began to speak, Holmes whipped out his pocket notebook, took notes. Eagerly he would await what he called the point of contact: "the formula—the place where the boy got his finger pinched in the machinery." Sometimes he caught onto it in the first five minutes, would promptly doze off.